Lickedspoon blog

Remembrance of cakes past

On Sunday, we went to Columbia Road Flower Market . It was so crowded, it being both gloriously, unexpectedly sunny and Mothers’ Day, I swear that at one point in the crush someone was trying to remove my kidney.

I jostled through the bouquet-toting masses (or should that be, massive) to Carl’s stall where I buy my cut flowers each week. His rows of jewel-coloured tulips, ranunculus, hyacinths and anemones looked tempting as an old-fashioned sweet shop and there, right in front, yellow and fluffy as day-old chicks, were armfuls of mimosa.

Mimosa’s sweet, clean, slightly briny smell always pulls me back to the Easter when I was 13 and staying with Laure, my French exchange. Each morning, I unwrapped myself from the cool linen sheets and stumbled in inky darkness to the windows. I opened the heavy shutters and the brilliant light of the South West flooded the room. The scent of the mimosa tree below was the first thing I smelled each day. Heady stuff for the girl from County Durham.

As you know, food was not the most important thing in our house. And yet there I was, cheating on my parents by falling so willingly, so wantonly in love with this home where dinner formed its beating pulse. I was the first to volunteer to collect the bread from the bakery, wandering back along the dusty path with the baguette under my arm, nibbling a few crumbs from its end as I went. I happily whisked vinaigrette for the salad, carefully measuring out three spoons of olive oil to one of red wine vinegar and just the right amount of mustard. I watched carefully when, after dinner, Madame threw together a chocolate cake for the following evening’s dessert.

A few months ago I found the little exercise book I’d filled during my trip. I wanted to hug my sweet, earnest 13-year-old self when I read this:

‘I wonder what I really will do! And I wonder what the me of 5 years time will think of this dreamy 13 year old who has many ideas but whose main fault is lazyness. Next term at school I will try to work harder. I say that every term.’

Intoxicated by my mimosa-madeleine-moment, I thought I’d make Madame Sarrodie’s chocolate cake and it was just as good as I remembered – rich and fudgy, with a crispy top, like the best brownie. I did tinker with it a bit (I can’t help myself), replacing margarine with butter and adding a little vanilla and salt.

I was also inspired by a great article by Xanthe Clay in The Telegraph on how to make killer brownies. In her quest to create the perfect, dense interior and crackled top, she gleaned a great tip from American Queen of All Things Chocolate, Alice Medrich. She advises taking the brownies out of the oven and immediately plunging the tin into iced water to stop the cooking process. I wanted to try this with my cake and was all ready to go, the sink bobbing with ice cubes, when I remembered I’d used a loose-bottomed tin. I managed to stop myself just in time, but if you use a simple cake tin, or next time you make brownies, do give it a go and let me know how you get on.

Madame Sarrodie’s chocolate cake


80g unsalted butter, plus a little more for greasing
180ml whole milk
125g dark chocolate, about 70%, broken into small pieces
175g caster sugar
3 eggs, separated
150g plain flour, seived
½ tsp vanilla extract
A good pinch of salt

Cocoa or icing sugar for dusting if you like

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas mark 4. Butter a 22cm, loose-bottomed cake tin then lightly dust it with cocoa.

In a saucepan over a low heat, melt together the butter and milk. Remove from the heat and add the chocolate. Leave it for a minute and then beat until smooth. Add the egg yolks one at a time, beating well after each addition, then add the vanilla and salt. Next, gently fold in the flour until just combined.

Beat the egg whites until stiff then gently fold them into the chocolate mixture with a spatula or metal spoon. Pour into the prepared tin and bake for 30-35 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out with a few moist crumbs clinging to it. Leave on a rack until cool enough to handle, then remove the tin and cool completely before cutting. You can dust it with icing sugar or cocoa if you’re having a fancy day.

TIP
When I’m baking chocolate cake, I dust the baking tin with cocoa rather than flour – you get the non-stickability, without the whitish floury film which spoils the look of your cake.

LICKED
Most sweet things benefit from a pinch of salt, and when I’m cooking with chocolate, I love to use this beautiful vanilla sea salt from Halen Môn , in Anglesey, Wales. It’s good, in very small doses, with scallops, too.

Impractically perfect in every way

When we were building a new kitchen onto the back of our Victorian house a couple of years ago, we planned to build a desk in the old, long-abandoned fireplace. How practical. The narrow alcove could be inexpensively adapted to house a writing surface for typing up recipes, paying bills and scribbling shopping lists. I’m bored just typing that.

One wintery afternoon, as I snaked along Oxford Street on the 73 bus, I realised that that wasn’t what I wanted at all. I wanted a proper fireplace, at waist height, like the ones I’d see in houses in France and Spain, one where we could grill a few steaks or sardines, roast some vegetables, cook a shish kebab or two. At great expense, the old chimney was lined. Supports were sunk into the heat-proof concrete to hold the grills.

If I’m honest, we don’t use it much to cook on. When the wind’s blowing in a certain direction, it smokes like it’s auditioning for a bit part in Shameless, staining the perfect white walls and ceiling with soot and stinging our eyes like a particularly vengeful onion. But I love it. The smell of it, the sight of it, the way it warms by back when I’m at the stove. Most of all, I love its wildly unruly and wilful presence in what would otherwise be a pristine steel and glass cube.

Firelighters
I’m all for recycling and one thing we have a lot of in this house is corks. I tip these into a jar filled with cheap brandy, a few cloves and a stick or two of cinnamon. They make great little firelighters tucked in among the crumpled newspaper and kindling, and they smell wonderful too.

Lady de B

I’d like to introduce you to Lady de Beauvoir. That’s not her real name – though Vanessa’s elevation to the peerage for services to the general jollity of the masses must surely be imminent? In the meantime, we all call her that because it’s the name of the part of London where she lives and because, while all around her are track suits and tower blocks, she negotiates those mean streets with velvet ballet slippers on her feet and a French market basket swinging from her arm. Her house sparkles with antique chandeliers and lovingly waxed floorboards.

At one point, Vanessa and I considered setting up our own business. We both spend an inordinate amount of time advising our many gay friends about the decoration and furnishing of their homes, obsessing over every detail, whether it’s what they should put on their perfect Matthew Hilton dining table or pour into their Jasper Conran wine glasses. We thought we could offer a one-stop queenly lifestyle advice service, everything from decorating and gardening to food, wine and flowers – the concept of GayCare was born. This wasn’t our only business idea – but given that our other flash of entrepreneurial brilliance was running a catering company out of the back of a vintage Bentley, we’re hardly beating a path to the Dragons’ Den.

Vanessa can throw a party for anything – a new job or new season’s asparagus, a good haircut or a surfeit of raspberries. So the sun coming out is definitely cause for celebration.

Yesterday, Vanessa held the inaugural barbecue of the season. Five of us sat amid pots of brightly coloured primulas and anemones on her pretty terrace, sipping the year’s first glasses of rosé and feasting on lamb chops, smoky baba ganoush and a mouth watering salad of crunchy cucumbers, hot, hot, hot red chillies and soothing dollops of mascarpone and crème fraîche. All definitely delicious, but by far the most spectacular dish of the day was a mountain of grilled prawns in a perky marinade. Lady de B says she based it on a Marcella Hazan recipe. She’s a braver woman than I to tinker with a recipe from that marvellous, and marvellously dictatorial, Italian food writer, but the results were addictively, messily wonderful.

Hard-core prawn

3-4 tbsps extra-virgin olive oil
3-4 tbsps vegetable oil
80g fine, dry breadcrumbs
1 small clove of garlic, finely chopped
3-4 tbsps finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
A good few pinches of sea salt
Plenty of freshly ground black pepper
1kg large prawns, unshelled but cut along the spine and the dark vein of intestines removed

Whisk together all of the marinade ingredients in a large bowl then add the prawns, mixing everything well with your hands and making sure you rub plenty of the tasty sauce into the cut part of the prawns. Marinate for about an hour in a cool place, ideally not the fridge.

Heat the barbecue until the coals glow red and are covered by a coating of white ash. Place the prawns on the grill in batches (use tongs – but you knew that, right?), turning after a couple of minutes and cooking until the prawns have taken on some colour and are just opaque in the middle. Don’t overcook – an overcooked prawn is a horrible thing, unless fish-flavoured chewing gum is something you crave. Make sure you have a mountain of napkins – they don’t have to be pretty little patches of Provençal linen like Lady de B’s, for the rest of us mere mortals, paper ones will do.